Why We Hate
Them: Arabs in Western Eyes
A new PBS documentary reveals how films and other
media have shaped an anti-Muslim narrative.

By Philip Giraldi

January 02, 2012 "The
American Conservative" -
Control of the preferred narrative is essential in
today’s instant-news political culture. This has
been particularly true since 9/11, as the United
States government and the cooperative media have
worked together to make sure that a series of
enemies are identified and then attacked as a
response to what has been shaped as a global
terrorist threat. Narrative-shifting also protects
against failure, by making it more difficult to
advance any actual inquiry either to learn what
motivates terrorists or to explore the apparent
inability of the federal government to respond
effectively. The best known attempt to shift the
blame and thereby redirect the narrative was
President George W. Bush’s famous
assertion that “those evildoers” of 9/11 “hate
us because of our freedom.” Other, more plausible
motives need not apply.

Later this
year PBS will release to its affiliates a
documentary film that it co-produced called
“Valentino’s Ghost.” I recently watched a preview
copy. In its full version it is 95 minutes long, and
it lays out a roughly chronological account of how
Muslims, particularly Arabs, have been perceived in
the West since the 1920s. Written and directed by
Michael Singh, it includes interviews with a number
of well-known authorities on the Middle East,
including Robert Fisk, Niall Ferguson, John
Mearsheimer, and the late Anthony Shadid, the
New York Times journalist killed in Syria last
February. The film explores the political and
cultural forces behind the images, contending that
the depiction of Arabs as “The Other” roughly
parallels the foreign policies of Europe and America
vis-à-vis the Middle East region. The title of the
film is taken from the first great cinematic “Arab,”
Italian Rudolph Valentino, who starred in the 1922
silent film “The Sheik.” When asked regarding the
plausibility of the script, in which English
aristocrat Lady Diana falls for the “savage” Sheik,
Valentino
responded “People are not savages because they
have dark skins. The Arabian civilization is one of
the oldest in the world…the Arabs are dignified and
keen brained.”

Valentino’s
cinematic triumph was followed by other films
extolling Arabian exoticism, including 1924’s “The
Thief of Baghdad,” starring Douglas Fairbanks. But
the cinematic love affair with Arabia did not last
long. The 1920s also witnessed Anglo-French moves to
divide up the Arab provinces of the defunct Ottoman
Empire and to gain control of Iran’s oil supply.The
Arabs, not surprisingly, resisted, which forced a
rethink of who they were and what they represented
as reflected in Eurocentric movies made in the
1930s, including “Beau Geste,” “The Lost Patrol,”
and “Under Two Flags.”

Arabs were
increasingly depicted in the cinema as lawless
savages who mindlessly opposed the advanced
civilizations of Europe, not unlike the American
Indians who had stood in the way of manifest
destiny. The possible motives for their savagery
were strictly off limits, as they were in the
American historical narrative. The good Arabs were
the ones who were “obedient” and sought
accommodation with the French and British. The bad
Arabs were the “disobedient” who sought to maintain
their traditional ways of life.

The rise of
the Zionist movement and the creation of the state
of Israel in 1948, with its forced relocation of
most Palestinians — which Mearsheimer describes as
“ethnic cleansing” — made further shifts in the
narrative essential, particularly to demonstrate
that Jews had a historic right to the land of
Palestine and that the creation of the Jewish state
was humanely carried out in a land that did not
exist politically and was largely empty and
undeveloped. Movies like “Exodus” and “Lawrence of
Arabia” appeared, with the former omitting the
Zionist terrorism that had led to the creation of
Israel while also emphasizing historic Jewish claims
to the land. The latter film expressed some sympathy
for Arab nationalism but also demonstrated that
savage and undisciplined Arabs could only triumph
militarily under European leadership. The two films
together largely completed the process of defining
the Arab in Western popular culture. In “Lawrence of
Arabia,” Peter O’Toole, playing Lawrence, described
Arabs as “a little people, a silly people. Greedy,
barbarous and cruel.” Nothing more need be said.

The Six-Day
War further added to the denigration of Arabs in
general. Israel’s surprise-attack triumph over its
neighbors, in which it was able to exploit superior
military resources, was seen as a victory of good
over evil in the U.S. media. Walter Cronkite
announced on the evening news that “Jerusalem has
been liberated.” Footage of long columns of
Palestinian refugees appeared briefly on television
but then disappeared completely. Mearsheimer
describes the post-1967 unwillingness to discuss
either the Palestinians’ plight or the nature of the
Israeli relationship with Washington as “The Great
Silence” fueled by “The Great Silencer,” namely the
charge of anti-Semitism or Jewish self-hating
inevitably leveled against any critic of Israel. The
circle of immunity from scrutiny for Israel also
extends to the principal Israel lobby AIPAC, which
was last featured on an investigative report on U.S.
television in 1977.

The Israeli
occupation triggered a wave of terrorism, and the
Palestinians sought to have their story told.
Limited media attempts to understand the Arab point
of view perhaps understandingly vanished completely
in 1972 after 11 Israeli athletes were murdered in
Munich. When Arabs subsequently sought to use an
economic boycott to force the West to stop Israeli
expansion on the West Bank, the U.S. media depicted
the action as an affront engineered by greedy oil
Sheiks.

The
increasingly harsh political environment, soon to be
framed as a clash of civilizations, corresponded
with a rise to prominence of evangelicals in the
U.S., together with the popularity of end-times
narratives in books and other media, including Hal
Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth.
Evangelical pastors such as John Hagee conflated the
return of the Jews to Israel with the Second Coming
of Christ, leading to unlimited political support
for Israel and identification of its Arab neighbors
as the enemy that would have to be confronted and
destroyed at Armageddon.

The Iranian
Embassy hostage crisis further hardened views of
Islam, with Ayatollah Khomeini lampooned on American
television and ABC News featuring a one-hour block
each night on “America Held Hostage,” more intensive
coverage than the network had given to the Vietnam
War. Ronald Reagan referred to the Iranians as
“barbarians,” and there was little effort made to
learn if there might be some legitimate grievances
(there were, dating back to the ouster of Mohamed
Mossadeq and the installation of the Shah in 1953).

In 1992 the
Disney animated movie “Aladdin” featured a song
during the opening credits that referred to Arabia
as a land “where they cut off your ear if they don’t
like your face, it’s barbaric.” Other major
Hollywood movies produced in the 1990s routinely
depicting Arabs as terrorists, even if an “obedient”
Arab frequently appears among the good guys,
included “Rules of Engagement,” “True Lies,” and
“The Siege.” 9/11 converted the disturbing or
sometimes vaguely amusing Arab into the Arab as
attacker, as an existential threat — witness the
success of the recent television series “24″ and
“Homeland.” The denigration of Arabs in the media
has real-world consequences: it is unlikely that
Madeleine Albright would have said the death of
500,000 Iraqi children was worth it or that Rush
Limbaugh would have described Abu Ghraib as a
“college fraternity prank” if one had been speaking
of European or American victims.

Niall Ferguson
notes that the justification provided through the
hyping of a dark and fearful external threat in
support of a burgeoning overseas empire inevitably
leads to a suspension of the rule of law back at
home. Robert Fisk observes that the shifts in
language and metaphor make the entire Middle East
unintelligible to most Americans, even to those who
claim to be well informed. Colin Powell, while
secretary of state, stopped referring to the West
Bank as occupied by Israel – he instead referred to
the area as “disputed,” a practice that continues to
this day in the mainstream media. That went along
with Jewish settlements being referred to in the
media as “neighborhoods” and the border wall being
called a “security fence.” Why would those
disgruntled Arabs want to fight over something that
is only disputed or object so strongly to a
neighborhood or a fence?

One of the
more interesting vignettes in the film takes place
near the end, with Hillary Clinton saying in March
2011 that many Americans are viewing Qatar-owned
television channel al-Jazeera for “real news”
because U.S. news programs have become so devoid of
content. Would that it were so. Al-Jazeera is only
available in New York; Washington, D.C.;
Burlington, Vermont; Toledo, Ohio; and Bristol,
Rhode Island — and only intermittently in many of
those locations, due to political objections over
its “Arab” and “anti-American” point of view.

If I have a
problem with “Valentino’s Ghost” it is that it tries
to do too much. It takes on many issues too
superficially given the film’s technical constraints
and time limitations. I have been informed that over
the objections of the producer the original
95-minute version has been edited down considerably
for the version that will be released to PBS
affiliates. PBS indicated that it would not use the
film without considerable changes. Much of the
excising relates to segments critical of Israel and
its policies, as well as its U.S. lobby, AIPAC. The
affiliates themselves can choose whether or not to
air the film, so there will probably be pressure
coming from donors and local programming boards not
to show it. This would be a shame, as “Valentino’s
Ghost” exposes widespread bigotry and the deliberate
shaping of a narrative against Arabs while also
providing considerable insights into why American
foreign policy continues to fail in an important
part of the world. One has to wonder what the
reaction would be if the film were to be viewed in
the White House.

Philip Giraldi,
a former CIA officer, is executive director of the
Council for the National Interest.

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